Dan Callahan

The problem with The Marriage, a well-meaning but structurally lopsided first feature from Yugoslavian director Blerta Zeqiri, is that the marriage plot from the title is so much less interesting than the love plot at its core.

Oliver makes sure that every scene in Jonathan is slow, earnest, tidy, and very cautious, and he pulls back from anything that might be too dramatic.

Tom of Finland is a film about a man who was famous for very dirty drawings, but it is unfortunately restricted by a dehydrated kind of good taste from ever being very dirty or very sexy.

Una keeps drifting away into flashy and superfluous details.

Nothing about the interactions between Daniel and his former pen pal in the second half of the movie are even remotely believable, and so the rosy climax of Private Desert enters the dangerous realm of fantasy and wish-fulfillment, revealing that the makers of this film are as recklessly naïve and morally questionable as their protagonists.

The early sections of Sidney are much stronger than what comes later, because it is Poitier himself telling the tale in interview footage and setting the expansive, very dramatic tone. He knew how to tell a story so that each nuance would make itself felt.

Tucked away in The Independent is a smaller family drama in which Elisha deals with her parents and the illness of her father. These scenes are far better than anything else in the film because Turner-Smith gets to play something realistic rather than over-the-top and plot-driven.

Curtis’s twee, nudging, corny comedic voice is very much the main sensibility here, far more so than anything offered by director Danny Boyle or anyone else involved.

The awkwardly titled gay rugby romance In from the Side is so padded out at 134 minutes with both rugby games and sex scenes that the final effect is numbing, and writer-director Matt Carter doesn’t bother much with either plot or character to fill out his narrative.

The Circle takes a valid concern about lack of privacy in the Internet age and turns it into a hyperbolic and finally laughable melodrama.

The structure here is haphazard, to say the least, and there is a serious lack of concentration and follow-through. Too much ground is covered too quickly, and often confusingly.

The new characters are all one-dimensional, and we learn nothing new about the old characters from the series.

Instead of focusing on the strength of some of her material here, Utt strikes out in far too many directions.

The bothersome and irritating thing about the way The Midwife is written is that we keep hearing detail after detail and story after story about the shared history between Claire and Béatrice, but we never get a solid idea of what that history was.

See How They Run lies as dead on the screen as the corpse of its murdered movie director.

The Turning is not a total loss. There are some stylish, nearly giallo-like sequences and sensitive performances from both Wolfhard and Prince, both of whom look like they could go further with their roles if the script didn’t eventually limit them to reactions in the second half.

Love and Fury itself feels like a commercial that can’t figure out what it is ultimately trying to sell.

Rampage is a movie that gets buried in its own top-heavy plot, collapsing itself under that weight just like the Chicago-area buildings do on screen.

Catherine Called Birdy only shows that dropping Dunham’s sensibility down into the Middle Ages results in a viewpoint that is suffocatingly small and unenlightening.

Silva has taken experiences from his own life for “Rotting in the Sun” in an attempt to dramatize or satirize things about the current culture that he hates, but his hate is so all-consuming yet so strangely mild that he misses most of the targets he is aiming for.

Almost Love is one of those ultra-mild movies that is reliant almost entirely on the likability of its large cast.

It is basically a standard triangle drama that has been stretched out to an interminable length.

The tone and plot of the film keeps swinging this way and that.

The Times of Bill Cunningham is more frustrating than Cunningham’s memoir and the earlier movie about him because it feels like he might want to talk somewhat more directly about his life experience, but the old-time prison of the closet is allowed to win out in the end, and what we’re left with here is choppy and insubstantial.

18 ½ attempts to be part cloak-and-dagger thriller, part romantic comedy, part screwball comedy, and part mood piece, and its plotting is slapdash, to say the least.

There is both too much plot in Just Getting Started and too little.

Wilson’s comic routines here set her apart from the others in the cast, and they more than amply hint that she should be set loose in her own vehicles far, far away from the other girls and all their “Glee”-like karaoke.

This movie is so crushing mainly because it was made by obviously smart people who are trying to dumb themselves down, and there’s nothing more excruciating than that.

It isn’t comedy, and it isn’t drama, much less comedy-drama.

With fantasy material like this, we need to be made to believe in the inventions and the conceits, and we cannot do that if they are shot and staged in such a truncated and perfunctory way.

The chief distinction of Replicas is how detached it often is from the expected sense of words and images.

Dolezal desperately tries to align herself with absurd terms like “trans racial” in order to try to find some way of making her way of life acceptable, but she always comes up short, and it is impossible to have any sympathy for her because she is so transparently a manipulator and a guilt-tripper.

Collateral Beauty is certainly a case of outright sentimental damage, not beauty, but of course the word collateral also means money that can be bargained with, and hopefully that’s what the ill-fated cast of this picture received in some abundance.

Pacific Rim Uprising has zero emotional pull.

Nina, an infuriatingly amateurish picture about the great singer and pianist Nina Simone, is a new low for the musical biopic genre.